SonoSketch is a tool to help you search through your sound effects collection. And it does not show you a text input field, which you would be familiar with when you ever used iTunes, but a drawing canvas. On that you can place different sounds, which are put together by SonoSketch and used to query your sound effect database. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But let us explain:

When developing SonoSketch, we took a look at how sound designers usually work. If you ask a sound designer to create a sound effect for you, he would walk into his workshop that is stuffed with all sort of sound-producing toys and tools: Numerous different door handles, all sorts of shoes, cans filled with sand, broken glass, sheets of aluminum, wooden sticks, and so much more. He would then usually produce the sound you asked him for with not only one of his tools, but with maybe a dozen of them. He might try out different recording techniques, layer sounds, mix sounds with pre-recorded samples on his computer, produce other sounds on a synthesizer, mix them again, throw everything away and start from the scratch. Anyways, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the workflow he uses: A sound designer composes a final sound effect from many sounds that he puts together. In his mind model, he thinks of a sound effect as a combination of other, “smaller” sounds.

We now took this mind model and put it into SonoSketch. When you are searching for a sound with SonoSketch, you also have to dissect your desired sound into its atomic ingredients. SonoSketch provides 50 of what we call “Atomic Sounds”, which can be used to recreate other, more complicated sounds. In the following three examples, you first can hear an original sound as taken from a sound effect library, then the SonoSketch search query, and finally the Atomic Sounds the search query consists of.

See, it’s not that hard. “Yes, but why painting?” we hear you cry. Well, since centuries now we’re painting notes on music sheets. The notes are placed along a timeline to conserve our musical ideas. Similar to this, SonoSketch allows you to place an the Atomic Sounds along a timeline. Placing a sound higher up results in a higher pitch, placing it lower on the canvas results in a lower pitch of that sound. Similar to a painter that places his colors on a canvas to produce a final picture, you can place different tone colors, different Atomic Sounds onto the SonoSketch screen. And again similar to a painter, you can use different tools to bring your sounds onto the canvas: A pen and a spray can.

Already while you are painting, our search algorithm scans your sound effect database for every sound that might be similar to what you just sketched. The algorithm even goes through hour-long recordings and looks for all similarities within a file. As soon as you do one little refinement on your sketch, the algorithm immediately takes your new composition of Atomic Sounds, synthesizes them into one audio file, computes some fuzzy math to find out how what you sketched actually sounds like, and searches again. All results are displayed in a standard Windows Explorer window, from where they can be dragged into the sound editing application of your choice. Simple, isn’t it?

You don’t even have to go through all of them one by one to select the one you like most, just use SoundTorch.

For further information, please watch this Youtube Video.